Background and motivation.
In universities all over the world, students need to be assigned to projects as part of their degree programmes. Lecturers typically offer a range of projects, and students may rank a subset of the available projects in preference order. Lecturers may have preferences over students, or over the projects they offer, or they may not have explicit preferences at all. There may also be capacity constraints on the maximum numbers of students that can be allocated to each project and lecturer. The problem of allocating students to projects subject to these preference and capacity constraints is called the spa (spa) [1]}[2]}, [3]}. Variants of this problem can be defined for the cases that lecturers have preferences over the students that rank their projects [4]}, or over the projects they offer [5]}, or not at all [6]}. In this paper we focus on the first of these cases, where lecturers have preferences over students – the so-called spa-s (spa-s).
